WRITING in his weekly newspaper column recovering alcoholic George Best has lambasted his 21-year-old son for running up huge debts in his name without his knowledge.

Calum, who admitted recently that his dad is "still a stranger to me" amassed vast debts on Best's debit card by staying three months at a London hotel and lying over his whereabouts.

Calling the incident a "betrayal" soccer legend Best reveals he was "embarrassed" to have his card rejected while shopping.

I should think Calum knows all about embarrassment and humiliation after years of telling chums his dad was a famous footballer but never being able to show him off.

Or, on the rare occasions they did meet, finding himself the subject of a photo-opportunity. What Calum did was certainly wrong but if he's repaying an absentee dad for all the calls never returned, birthdays missed, Christmas's forgotten and promises unkept, can it really be a surprise to his father?

"I feel shocked and hurt," Best told an army of readers who did not really need to share this domestic dispute.

Sobriety has finally taught him to feel something then. This, I suspect, is what his son might call a result.

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FORMER New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, here to receive an honorary knighthood, will promote the so-called "broken windows" method of policing.

Successfully employed in the US, the idea is to target petty criminals like beggars, "squeegee merchants", vandals and small-time drug dealers to prevent more serious offences.

At the same time, Scotland Yard plans to extend the "softly-softly" approach to cannabis use. Cannabis, as far as I know is still an illegal drug, but in Brixton where this experiment has been practised for six months, locals claim that dealers have never felt more free to peddle their wares.

You don't have to be in the pro-cannabis lobby or an anti-drug campaigner to see that we can't have it both ways. The broken windows theory and softly-softly approach are 100 per cent incompatible. Ask Giuliani.